Most programmers are faced at some time or another with the prospect of understanding the structure of existing software, whether it be for maintenance or development. More often than not, program documentation is insufficient and a programmer is forced to examine actual source code for this task. For large and complex programs this exercise is time consuming and error prone. Consequently, tools to aid in the efficient and effective inspection of programs are very valuable. One type of such tools is program browsers.
Program browsers are sometimes provided with modern compiler products and require a language dependent program processor, whose functionality includes fully-fledged parsing of the source code as well as some semantic analysis. Also desirable is the provision of sophisticated and efficient display and search capabilities, together with a convenient user interface.
However, at the present time the very rapid changes and developments in the field of browser technology has meant that providing program development tools which keep pace with the latest developments in browser technology can be a real problem. In addition, changes in programming languages give rise to the need for new browsers.
Also available are document browsers which take as input a document which includes certain control tags, interpret the tags and present the document to the user on a computer screen. Examples of such browsers are the IBM BookManager software product from IBM Corp, which uses the BookMaster tag language and the various browsers which are available to view documents which employ HTML tags. The HTML tag language is used by documents which make up the World Wide Web.